Social Media is as big, if not bigger, than ever in terms of a great place to use for marketing your business.  You’ve got to make sure that you use them correctly, though or you’ll run the risk of being labeled a spammer on every social network that you’re on and you’ll quickly lose friends/followers/etc. quicker than you can snap your fingers.  You can market yourself indirectly, rather than just including links to your site and saying “HEY – Go here and buy my products/services!”.  Including social media in your email marketing campaigns is a great example of this.

A recent study by Marketing Sherpa concluded that simply including sharing buttons to an e-mail marketing campaign led to a “25% boost in reader interaction, and a surge in inbound traffic from social networking sites.” Moreover, huge gains were reported in traffic via social sites: 2,070% from LinkedIn, 1,680% from Twitter, and 1,351% from Facebook.

Above all, don’t forget to “cross-pollinate” your marketing efforts.  If you are including sharing buttons in your email marketing campaign, don’t forget to remind your friends/followers on your social media sites that you have an email newsletter that they can sign up for.  This gets the promotion to them indirectly, as they feel that they are in control of having your advertisements show up in their Inbox, rather than showing up on their social media pages just because they’re you’re friend.  They can unsubscribe (theoretically – make sure this works!) from your e-mail marketing campaign if they feel that it’s not a good fit for what they are looking for, without de-friending you or unfollowing you.  It’s a much more user-friendly way of advertising to your audience.

Global time spent on social networking sites saw an 82% increase year over year in the month of December ‘09, amounting to five hours and thirty minutes per user per month, according to a just-released study by the Nielsen company. Facebook  led the way in time spent, and in traffic.  With this in mind, you simply cannot ignore the importance of utilizing social media for marketing your business.  Customers are more frequently turning to social media rather than simply using traditional search to find what they are looking for.  If you don’t capture the lead from social media, you can certainly bet that one of your competitors will.